What will the Sustainability future look like? Will it be a human future?

What will the Sustainability future look like? And what will be the role of humans? This is a tough question and not a question will try to answer in this post. It would need a proper book to answer this question. No one has the possibility to look into the future of course. But making an educated guess is always useful. A good starting point is to listening to someone who really knows what he/she is talking about. That kind of person for me is Yuval Noah Harari. I have read both of his books and a lot of my current world view is based on topics he is addressing in both books. Here is Mr Harari at the WEF 2018 just a few days ago.

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Will the Sustainability future be human?

Where is the sustainability future going towards? Will this future be automated (Harari argument) or mainly be influenced by humans? These are just two questions that are impossible to answer today. But here is my take on this Sustainability future and the importance of the human factor.

The integration of sustainability will be automatic: Living and making business as sustainable as possible and everything that comes with it, will to be nothing special in the future. Sustainable business and sustainable living needs be the norm in the future. That is at least what I hope it will be. It is a nice-to-do action to be more sustainable for each of us at the moment (2018). But the future will be an enormous challenge if we continue on our unsustainable path. Having said that, I am also convinced that our future will be a much more sustainable one. And there will be no choice to not be sustainable. Our current reality of over-consumption will be a reality of the past once governments, politicians and big corporations realise that a sustainable future is our only future and will start to act. Progress towards sustainability will be an automated process that can not be stopped once the integration is progressing at a much faster pace.

The human sustainability influence: Our future might be overwhelmed by the Big Data topic and algorithms are the way to sell your product. But to achieve sustainability the human factor will be the key to success. It is our responsibility to win everyone’s heart and mind to convince them to change their ways. And only a human-to-human relationship can achieve this in my experience. Sustainability is such personal challenge and each and everyone is different in their quest to be more sustainable. I believe that the integration of sustainable practices will be an automated process. And the direction will be given by us humans.

The future is bright in my view. I am an eternal optimist and I am optimistic about our sustainability future. So let get going and create our future today and tomorrow.